alt Hacker NewsOh the downplaying
> In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots
In what way is this copy&paste-like staple of general computing some "specialized" task?
Will the new opportunities include reaching "specialized" feature parity?
> In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.
Replies
If you're not familiar, the way X11 works is comparable to "multiplayer notepad" for your pixels ("multiplayer MSPaint"?).
All your monitors are combined into a large canvas where every pixel can be written and read by any X11 client.
Screenshots (and screen sharing) could be silently performed with zero user feedback (or any good way to even detect when apps might be doing this maliciously, AFAIK).
This is one of the big "security implications" that motivated Wayland (and somewhat similarly, the Flatpak sandbox and the XDG Portal infrastructure that has by now outgrown it).
The infrastructure is already there, for 3rd party apps to request these abilities (with the user getting the choice of following through, or denying the request), e.g.:
- https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
- https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.fr...
Keep in mind that any action which doesn't require interactivity every time (e.g. restarting the screensharing of a previously-chosen window/display) could have "user gave permission" be remembered, but that seamless case still only applies to that combination (so that client can't peek at anything else than what it was offered).
Anyway, what the blog post is talking about is really just 3rd party apps that haven't been updated (and e.g. might already not function properly inside Flatpak).
> feature parity
If we are being honest, screenshots/screensharing was never a "feature" of X11, it was a big security hole abused as a feature.
It's actually wild that they're trying to sell lack of basic desktop features as "security features". Try explaining to an average person that when they are playing a game and want to capture a cool moment to share on Discord with their friends that by design the window server they are using will not let them do that and it's "for their own good". Like God forbid I want my computer to be actually usable. We had the same situation in the past when Wayland lacked a way to lock in the cursor within a window and it took them like 8 years to develop a "protocol" or whatever they call it. Imagine that for each basic desktop usability/UX feature, we will have to wait another decade. At that rate Linux will never have widespread adoption on desktop. Wayland sometimes feels like an active effort to sabotage Linux on desktop.